It's not R but It's VERY useful

On the chance that you are talking about replacing a word, say, 500 times in a large text file, you might be interested in sed.

Example (you must be in a unix environment with GNU free software):

sed 's/old_word/new_word/g' text_file > new_text_file

After which, new_text_file will contain the contents of text_file, except with the new_word values in place of the old_word values. For those interested in more detailed information, as usual, man (in this case man sed) is your friend.